Jerome is a divorced 56-year-old estate agent living in a small northern French town who likes to go rolling in the woods: "I often have to go deep into the forest … I need to smell, I run, roll into a ball, lie out flat, resting my cheek against the leaves, stroking the grainy underside of bracken." Such unusual behaviour seems to return him to his origins, as an abandoned Jewish child discovered in the undergrowth during the second world war, and it especially endears him to Vilno Smith, a peculiar Scottish house-hunter whose list of requirements includes "an old house surrounded by cow parsley and a well with a chain and a pulley that goes eek eek eek". Agnès Desarthe's quirky French bestseller is conceived in hazy, impressionistic prose that occasionally feels like one is reading through a fine mist, but it captures the ennui of the featureless country town the French know as a bled: "The damp, persistent, cold white skies; the church with its cracked bell-tower, the Bar des Sports whose Christmas decorations don't come down till April."